We have to talk about the leaderboard
Pebble leaderboard. Two apps are conspicuously at the top.
Hey y'all. I want to talk to you real quick about leaderboard manipulation. Over the past 24 hours, 2 watchfaces and apps have had a sudden and meteoric rise towards the top of the leaderboard with seemingly no reason: Natural Time by Sylvain Biquette and Circula by Dheeraj Uppalapati. I have been tracking the rise of these products along with alex_pavlov, the creator of Playback for Spotify, and we have reason to believe that these two products' meteoric rise is achieved through the use of fake (or botted) likes.
First off, who am I and why should you trust anything I say? I am Evie Finch, the creator of the Royale watchface, which is possibly the actual most viral watchface or app on the leaderboard. Despite uploading my face very late into the competition, I have managed to get into the top 10, and I believe this is partially due to my marketing strategy. I was able to cause this rise through creating some moderately successful posts on both Reddit and Mastodon, so I think I know something about about social media strategy. In fact, what I find incredibly interesting and suspicious about these products is their social media strategy, or lack thereof. So, let's talk about it.
What's the deal with the top 2 apps and faces?
Natural Time is a fun, quirky watchface made by a French Youtuber, Biquette, who has about 8,000 subscribers. He has marketed the watch face in a Youtube Short, whose translated title reads "Can you help me win a contest? #pebble #naturaltime", which features him asking his viewers to create an account and vote for him in the contest while he's walking through the forest. He has also marketed it on his blog with one blog post with 0 comments, and a Telegram post sharing his short, with 6 comments and 10 emoji reactions. This is a pretty fair response, but the click-through rate (how many people click on a link in the description) of a Youtube short is not great, ranging from less than 1% to around 10%, and the conversion rate (how many people actually do the thing you want after clicking through) is also pretty bad. You can see this in his comments, which has about 19 people saying they have hearted his watchface, and one complaining about how they couldn't figure out how to make an account and like the face. Before his video, his watchface was moderately successful on the leaderboard. It was at 8th place on Wednesday, with 66 likes, around Tamagotchi Emulator and Pixel Pastures. After the video, it moved up to first at a rapid pace. This would not be unexpected from a viral video, but there's one notable quality that made me write this post: The increase in votes is strictly linear.
Here is Natural Time's likes over time, which is based on screenshots of the leaderboards that I have collected. When the short is uploaded on Friday 1:06pm UTC, the like count has a sharp, linear increase until it gets to around 9pm UTC, after which it resumes gaining likes at around the rate it did before the video. This is an increase of about 80 likes over 8 hours. From my own experience, when something goes viral naturally, it has a brief period of a higher than average gain in attention (gaining traction), before having a rapid surge in attention (doing numbers), until that rate of increase slowly degrades, and then levels off. This does not look like organic growth. In fact, I would consider an organically viral watchface to be closer to something like Comic Drop by Khaki Lee, which was directly linked by Eric on Twitter and Bluesky, or Royale by me, which had an incredibly successful reddit post.
All of this is trying to make one thing very clear, Natural Time, which has extenuating circumstances that could be argued to justify its virality, likely does not have organic growth.
Anyways, Circula doesn't even have that. Circula has had one reddit post with 6 upvotes and 2 comments and that's all, and yet it has literally the exact same number of likes as Natural Time. It climbed the leaderboard both closer to the end and faster than Natural Time. At least make it look realistic, dude.
Why am I writing this?
There's two reasons for this:
First, the contest has a monetary prize. If people win this, they get actual real money, or something they can convert into actual real money. When real money is involved, cheating is much more likely to happen, which needs to be punished swiftly and harshly, otherwise other people will believe they can do the same thing and get away with it.
Second, I think the community matters. The real top 5 apps are actual members of the community. I have talked to most of them, and have seen them all interact with other developers in the Rebble Discord server. I have even asked some of these people for help when developing my watchface. For example, FouzR (developer of seiko-data) was very active in the Discord thread I posted development logs in, and alex_pavlov (developer of Playback for Spotify) developed telegram bots to track the leaderboards because of this situation, and helped provide data for the graph. On the other hand, Sylvain Biquette and Dheeraj Uppalapati are not community members at all. They're denying the actual developers who actually give back the chance to be respected for their work. Biquette has even said that he doesn't even wear a watch and hasn't heard about Pebble before the competition!
What should be done about this?
I think Core Devices needs to do a couple things: they need to review all of the leaderboards for suspicious activity, and they need to put processes in place to ensure this never happens again. This will guarantee that all the actual winners are things that people actually voted for in both Week 1 and Week 2, and prevent this from happening in any future contests. (Don't forget, this is the Spring 2026 contest. That implies there might be contests in other seasons and in other years.)
I also think the community should get involved and show their support for apps and watchfaces made by real people who are actually involved. I am providing below a short list of some that I know are made by people on the Rebble Discord, and I encourage people who to share their own faces and apps in the comments if they've given back to the community in their own way:
- Playback for Spotify by alex_pavlov
- Pebbal - Miniature Pinball by Stubenhocker
- Skyarc by Chris Lewis
- Bearing by astosia
- seiko-data by FouzR
- Royale by Me
- 3D Coins & Dice by Buildy.Industries
- Kirby's Return to Pebble Land by BoxofDanger
- Pixel Pastures by James Downs
- Pebble Pillage by grump
- Treble by Logan Head
- ...And many more
Thanks for reading. You can find my data on Natural Time on Google Sheets if you wish to review it. I don't have data on Circula because I wasn't tracking it before it was already too late.